2013 North India floods

NASA satellite imagery of Northern India on 17 June, showing clouds that led to the devastation

In june 2013, major floods and landslides occurred in the Uttarakhand state, in the Himalayan mountains of North India. More than 1000 people have dead and many still missing[1]. For more details see 2013 North India floods on Wikipedia.

Flash flooding in the mountains and some flooded areas of cropland downstream.

This wiki page is to coordinate remote mapping for HOT contributors around the world. Collaboration of people with contacts in the Uttarakhand region would greatly help to adjust to the priorities of the humanitarians on the field.

Highlights

Humanitarian Mapping Project (HMP), Mid-june 2013 For HOT contributors, this is the first step of intervention where we start mapping, assess the situation, re-evaluate regulary and decide actions to be taken. The HOT contributors responded quickly by mapping areas where damages and casualties were reported (See town/city mapping below).

The situation is re-evaluated regularly to decide to stop the action or to provide more ressources. A formal Activation with the highest priority for HOT will be started if the situation justify it (ie, coordination with other organizations intensify and more ressources are needed)

Activation request to the Digital Humanitarian Network from Seed India, July 4 2013 Following this request, HOT joined the DHN solution team, and started the process to identify and map over 4,000 villages impacted by the flood in four districts of Uttarakhand state. Remote mapping coordination is done through the HOT Tasking manager, job 274. Bing High-res imagery is used to map this area.

Coordinators of this action : Pierre Béland and Andrew Buck

For more information : contact the HOT Support Team at info@hotosm.org

HOT Tasking Manager

HOT HDDM Style : Humanitarian focused OSM base layer

OSM Extract : Overpass Query for Uttarakhand village places

OSM tools

For people to map remotely, to do Field Data Collection or analyse the DATA, the OSM community provides various tools and services.

Remote Mapping : Create an OSM account to access the Task Manager and to uplaod data to the OSM Daatabase using the OSM editors

this Overpass-turbo.eu Query will extract all village places tags of Uttarakhand state (2013-08-09, 2503 places reported)

this Overpass-turbo.eu Query will extract all village places tags of Uttarakhand state where no name is provided (2013-08-09, 238 places reported)

This Overpass-api.de Query will extract landuse area polygons for a rectangular zone that cover most of Uttarakhand state; since it necessitates more ressources, a different api is used and the result automatically downloaded as an OSM file (2013-08-09, 7597 residential area polygons reported)

Identification of priorities and local facilities to support displaced people

If you are in contact with local NGO or you have knowledge of the area, you can contribute to geolocate and describe various public facilities and shelters. Please report any established priorities expressed by the local NGO's to the HOT Discussion list. This will facilitate the coordination with the HOT contributors.

Local mapping information

If anyone can report on which bridges are out and other road connections effected, please be in Contact the OSM community or dive in and edit the map!

Remote mapping work to do

Connecting roads / tracks / paths. Many of these towns are isolated and the main roads connecting to these areas need to be completed.

River details. Starting with larger rivers first. It is also important to trace streams coming from the surrounding mountains and to locate the residential areas. See below.

According to a BBC article, there are currently over 1000 dead from the flooding and the town of Kedarnath (now fully mapped) is the worst affected. Downstream city of Haridwar also suffered damage. Extensive damage to the roads in the area is reported. The state capital Dehradun is the base of the relief effort and some evacuees have been taken there.

Town/City mapping

Dehradun is a big city with lots of potential for mapping of roads from bing to do. Start with larger roads first to get the main network in. Some rivers too. Checking road/rail/air access is probably a priority too. Haridwar was affected due to the floods and is another important town to start with.

River mapping

You can help river mapping across this large area of mountains. The challenge is to try to focus efforts on larger more significant missing rivers. It is also important to locate the residential areas, to trace a polygon around these areas and to add the tag landuse=residential.

Easiest is to look at the following map and start with resolving the notes:
view the map here, which shows terrain and some 'notes' for missing rivers.

Zoom in on a red note, and edit the map to add in missing waterway=river ways. 'resolve' the note when it's done.

Please don't hesitate to resolve any note where there is now a river added by you or anyone else. Harry has quickly sprinkled these notes across this large area to indicate missing large rivers (judgements based on viewing the terrain contours using OpenCycleMap) An even larger area to the North East is probably also relevant, but the challenge will be to use judgement about what is a larger more significant missing river.

In JOSM, OpenCycleMap layer can help find areas with important slopes and to track Waterways in these areas. You can also look out for landuse areas and to create a polygon around these areas (landuse=residential).